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A depiction of various concepts for the Mars Sample Return mission.(Image credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech)ShareShare by:
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NASA’s Mars Sample Return initiative has been effectively terminated, implying the strongest clues of Martian life could be held within rock specimens that NASA lacks the funding to retrieve.
The U.S. Senate gave the nod to a spending bill on Monday (Jan. 15) that nullifies the Trump administration’s move to cut federal science spending in half and diminish NASA’s budget by almost a fourth.
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“The deal does not endorse the existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) program,” legislators wrote in a report accompanying the bill, released on Jan. 6.
There’s no certainty life has ever been present on Mars, but should it have been, the Perseverance rover could already possess the evidence. This makes the fresh bill a significant setback for those desiring to analyze Perseverance’s accumulation of over 30 geological samples, featuring a sample NASA has depicted as “the clearest indication of life” ever detected on Mars.
However, ferrying samples from Mars back to Earth was invariably destined to be an expensive undertaking, and the MRS initiative has been riddled with postponements and inflating expenses. In January 2025, an independent review board estimated the price could climb to $11 billion, with sample arrival on Earth not anticipated until 2040.
In a major revision of the program, NASA revealed it would explore two distinct plans for gathering the specimens: a tried and reliable landing mechanism that employed a rocket-fueled sky crane at an aggregate projected expense of between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, and a commercial choice with a cost positioned somewhere between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. NASA intended to declare a selection among these options in the latter part of 2026.
Yet, although the Senate’s action outwardly backs the White House’s aspiration to terminate the program, the funding legislation might permit NASA wiggle room to resurrect the MSR. The enactment, which acknowledges that technologies developed as a component of the MSR program were vital to the triumph of upcoming space endeavors and human investigation of the moon and Mars, allocates $110 million to the Mars Future Missions program, encompassing current MSR endeavors for “radar, spectroscopy, entry, descent, and landing systems, and translational precursor technologies.”
Put differently, there is funding for some of the technology the program was endeavoring to pioneer, while remaining far from the overall anticipated mission expenditures. The commitment of $110 million nevertheless sparks anticipation for the destiny of sample return, as per The Planetary Society, which advocated against more drastic suggested reductions to NASA’s science program.
A composite image of canisters holding Martian specimens that NASA desires to retrieve to Earth.
The recent bill entrusts $24.4 billion to NASA, with $7.25 billion earmarked for the space agency’s Science Mission Directorate. That indicates Congress only lessened the NASA science segment of the budget by 1% in contrast to the prior year — a substantially more modest decrease than the 47% curtailment suggested by the Trump administration.
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Lawmakers also assigned funds to other NASA science projects within the enactment. The arrangement entrusts $500 million for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, $208 million for the active James Webb Space Telescope, and $300 million for the recently finalized Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, poised to seek out extraterrestrial worlds and delve into the genuine essence of dark matter when it initiates launches as early as this autumn.
The funding measure now awaits approval from President Trump to be enacted into law.
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Should the U.S. indeed relinquish the ambition of ferrying samples from Mars, it will abandon the field to China. China’s Tianwen-3 sample return undertaking strives to amass fewer samples at a more reachable and less promising location than where Perseverance has searched for prospective indications of life. Nevertheless, the Tianwen-3 mission is slated to commence in 2028 and yield rocks in 2031. Should sample return be a contest, then China may be positioned to secure victory.
“It is challenging to comprehend how the cessation of MSR is anything other than a concession that retrieving samples from Mars is overly intricate for the United States,” Victoria Hamilton, esteemed space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and chair of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), conveyed to Live Science’s sister-site Space.com on Jan. 12. “How can we anticipate triumph in something several orders of magnitude more audacious and costly, such as the Moon to Mars program, where human lives are susceptible?”
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Patrick PesterSocial Links NavigationTrending News Writer
Patrick Pester fulfills the role of trending news author at Live Science. His work is published on additional science websites, like BBC Science Focus and Scientific American. Patrick transitioned to journalism after dedicating his initial career to working in zoos and wildlife preservation. He secured the Master’s Excellence Scholarship to pursue studies at Cardiff University, where he earned a master’s degree in international journalism. He also holds a second master’s degree in biodiversity, evolution, and conservation in action from Middlesex University London. When he isn’t composing news, Patrick scrutinizes the commerce of human remains.
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